“Look out!” yelled Rebona Myking from somewhere behind me. Startled, I simultaneously let go of the welder and stumbled on the uneven floor. MacKay’s huge fist whistled past my ear as I fell. As I rolled desperately away from his flailing boots Rebona and two Bagpipes entered the room.
“What are they doing here?” I panted, gesturing at Tall And Thin and Trunk like An Elephant, nonetheless very glad that they had arrived. For Xerxes and his crony MacKay had suddenly lost all interest in me.
“I’m sorry, but after I left your ship the Bagpipes found me again and demanded that I tell them what you were going to do. I tried to explain as well as I could but I think all I managed to do was confuse and upset them. They apparently decided to take some decisive action and they insisted that I come along to translate.”
His tussle with me now forgotten, MacKay uttered an inhuman cackle and once again pointed the welder at the wall. The Bagpipes immediately began to hoot like a broken calliope. Ignoring them, MacKay fumbled for the trigger.
Trunk Like An Elephant scurried forward and wrapped two of his tentacles around the muzzle. Instead of contesting the Bagpipe for possession of the welder, however, MacKay let it swing free until its muzzle was pointed at the center of the alien’s body. Then he pulled the trigger.
A blazing line of electricity splashed across and then through the Bagpipe. Trunk Like An Elephant uttered a single horrible discordant honk and fell to the floor, his central torso a smoking ruin. MacKay stared at the fallen Bagpipe’s body, laughed, then raised the welder and swung it towards Tall And Thin. But the second Bagpipe was ready for him.
So quickly that the motion was barely visible, Tall And Thin produced a small egg-shaped device from one of his apron pockets. He waved it at MacKay in a pattern of three vertical strokes and six horizontal ones. At each stroke a thin, cleaving beam projected from the glittering egg and passed effortlessly through MacKay’s body. In the space of a heartbeat MacKay fell apart like an onion diced by a chef’s invisible knife. Three seconds after MacKay had turned the welder toward Tall And Thin he was nothing but bleeding chunks of meat, steaming and dripping on the cavern floor.
Now the Bagpipe turned the egg towards Xavier Xerxes. Still under the psychotropic affect of the crystal’s wails, the terrified prospector burst into wracking sobs. Deep, ominous hoots rumbled from Tall And Thin’s upper tubes as he raised the egg.
“Wait!” Rebona screamed. Whitefaced and sweating, she thumped her computer and initiated a furious volley of noise. Tall And Thin paused, then hooted back at her. “He says you’ve got to come with us,” she eventually told the blubbering Xerxes. “He… he says that if you make any trouble at all he’ll… he’ll kill you just… just the way he did your friend.” She turned away from the ghastly carnage.
Without waiting for a reply, Tall And Thin slid forward with his usual peculiar grace, grabbed Xerxes’s wrists with two of his tubes, and yanked the miner towards the tunnel. As he slithered past Rebona, a third appendage snaked out to grab her right arm. Startled, she uttered a muffled gasp. Tall And Thin’s only response was to wrap another tube around her waist and drag her even closer.
Without conscious thought I started towards the Bagpipe. In a blur of motion one of his lower appendages seized a rock from the floor of the cavern and launched it with terrible accuracy at the top of my head. The struggling form of Rebona Myking was the last thing I saw as I lost consciousness.
Like everything else in Saguaro, police headquarters was inside a giant cactus. The officers seemed marginally less listless than most of the other natives I had so far encountered. Perhaps they weren’t allowed to chew on duty.
“So you’re the facilitator,” the chief of police said without any sign of friendliness. A sign on his desk identified him as Colonel Gerald Mouers. Tall, leathery, and completely bald, with a long, beaklike nose, he made me think of an ancient Galapagos sea turtle.
“Ex-facilitator, but how did you know that?”
“Xerxes managed to get out a brief call on his wristphone before it went dead. According to him he’s been kidnapped by the Bagpipes. He said you were involved.”
“In the sense that I tried to save him and got knocked unconscious for my trouble,” I growled as I rubbed the egg-sized lump on the top of my head. Flakes of dried blood drifted down to the Chief’s immaculate desk.
“Tell me about it,” the Colonel ordered, waving me to a seat and, after a moment’s hesitation, passing across a bottle of painkillers from a desk drawer.
I told him, leaving out any mention of what I had learned about the crystals from the Bagpipes.
“So Dolf MacKay’s got himself chopped up into little bits, has he?” mused Mouers when I had finished. He didn’t seem particularly upset by the news. “He’s another offworlder, from Propertyville, I think.”
“I suppose,” I said impatiently. “But even if you can’t blame the Bagpipe for killing MacKay in self-defense, I don’t know what they might be doing to Xerxes right now, and, more importantly, to Rebona Myking. What are you going to do?”
“A posse of sworn deputies is being assembled up on the roof right now. You figure they’ve taken them back to their cactus?”
“They don’t respond like humans. I don’t think it would occur to them to try to hide.”
“Then we’ll go over there and get the two of them back.”
“You’d better be careful. We don’t have any idea what kind of technology they’ve got.”
Colonel Mouers considered my words. “You’re a facilitator, a disbarred one at that, not a law enforcement officer. So leave the law enforcing to us—we know our job.” He tugged at his bony nose. “On second thought, I think I’ll ask you to come along. You said you’d been inside their cactus—you might be useful.”
I nodded with no great enthusiasm. The colonel was obviously of the “Puli out your gun and kick in the door,” school of policemen. It was highly probable that he was going to charge in without further thought and get himself and his so-called posse summarily slaughtered. That didn’t bother me—but it was probably going to be up to me to think of something to keep Rebona Myking from being chopped to bits along with the others.
It was late afternoon when our convoy of twelve civilian aircars and two official ones containing perhaps thirty-five people approached the Bagpipes’s Demon Lover cactus. Slightly below the lead vehicle in which I rode I could see the cactus’s bright yellow and orange flowers in full bloom. Not entirely the fool I thought him to be, the cautious Colonel Mouers followed at a discreet distance.
I turned to the grim-faced female police officer sitting at the controls. “What do you—” That was when, in the middle of a clear and entirely unobstructed sky, we ran into something.
As the lead aircar, we had already slowed to little more than twenty miles an hour but the impact still felt like we had run into a huge, slightly flexible plastic wall. An instant later I was in total darkness as the craft’s airbags deployed around us. And moments after that I felt my head and stomach changing places in nauseating fashion.
We were falling, tumbling as we went.
From 500 feet…
An eternity later, still enveloped by the airbags, we smashed into the desert.
When we were pulled from the wreckage my heart was pounding furiously—but my only injury was a slight tenderness in my ribs where an airbag had thrust my arm painfully against my side.
“What happened?” I muttered to Colonel Mouers, who stood scowling down at me.
“It looks like you ran into a force-field.”
“Forcefields are impossible.”